Asked why she had named her twins
Morphine and Opium, a young mother explained: "Well, I read in a paper that
morphine and opium is products of a wild poppy. The poppy of these younguns was
jist about as wild a man as I've ever knowed."

In another community a girl who
was one family's great hope and joy went away to college, promising that she
would come back with a diploma. Instead she came back pregnant. When a baby girl
was born, of course she was named Diploma.

That was perhaps a better name
than the two bestowed on the offspring of another girl who had gone astray and
then gone back home. She called her twins Saffilis and Gonora. (Sodom and Gomora
were the choices of still another young woman.)

And who knows what was in the
minds of the couple who called their twins Max and Climax?

Hook, J. N. The Book of Names,
A Celebration of Mainly American Names: People, Places, and Things. Franklin
Watts, 1983.